With a trio of men decked out in gaudy dresses and absurdly over-the-top headwear, high heels and low wise-cracking innuendos, powered by a bus painted gorgeous pink, Priscilla Queen Of The Desert comes flouncing and flaunting into the West End. I welcome it with open arms and a glad rag-bag of positive adjectives. London has never played host to a musical pitched on a higher level of gayness and camp comedy, transsexual barrier-breaking and bitchy, witty drag-queenery, than this ingenious adaptation of the sensational film of the same name.

At a time when escapist musicals are all the rage, here’s a rare one that takes you happily out of yourself and into daring places your wildest fantasies might never have dreamed of visiting. Priscilla Queen Of The Desert should, therefore, do an absolutely roaring trade, and not just among the young and gay-friendly. With homophobic bullying in London schools and attacks on gay men on the dramatic rise and a few, mad, dangerous Muslims in town calling for homosexuals to be stoned to death, Priscilla offers a joyful antidote to a world of hatred and violence.

From the first moments when three divas hang suspended high above a silver-spangled bridge and belt out Downtown, the show never loses its spectacular, helter-skelter momentum of songs to which the drag queens lip-sync.

They all dance to Ross Coleman’s pugnacious choreography in an ever wilder outrage of costumes, right down to ridiculous belle époque corseted dresses and hats variously piled heavy with fruit, flowers and feathers: Simon Phillips’s production artfully exploits the fact that drag queenery relies on excess and exaggeration.

The plot is both simple and absurd. It offers the prospect of a risky odyssey into the heart of the rural outback of Australia by three mascara-laden drag queens with a serious talent to amuse and verbally abuse. Their low comedy gives high pleasure. Tony Sheldon’s sardonic Bernadette, a stately, middle-aged transsexual laid low by her young lover’s death in a hair-dyeing misadventure, sets out on that bus with Jason Donovan’s pleasant Tick, otherwise known as Mitzi, whose plan is to end up at Alice Springs, to visit a young son from his discarded, heterosexual past. Who better than Oliver Thornton’s muscly, super-feminine Felicia to join them on their bus-trip, drag-queening as they go?

Phillips, who gives the production such brio and dashing momentum, has sensibly exchanged the Abba songs used in the film for mainly gay disco and glam rock hits. Bogie Wonderland, I Will Survive and a Kylie medley are delivered with terrific panache. When these gender- illusionists have dragged up, faced bar-room violence and returned to their bus to find the words "f**k off, faggots" painted all over it, the singing of Both Sides Now is given a searing poignancy. In similar fashion Always On My Mind, Tick’s song to his son who comes to accepts his gay father, helps bring a reconciling laughter and pathos to this bitter-sweet, big-hit musical, that stands up for brave sexual outsiders.